Peter L. Salk, M.D., son of Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, and president of the Jones Salk Legacy Foundation, takes questions during the lecture hosted at Ursinus College Wednesday. (Photo by Adrianna Hoff / Times Herald)

COLLEGEVILLE — Ursinus Colleges’ Center for Science and the Common Good hosted the son of the man who discovered the vaccine for polio. Dr. Peter Salk, son of the late Dr. Jonas Salk, came to Ursinus to discuss his father’s work in the polio vaccine and his interest in humanity and how people came together to help each other when polio was killing thousands of people in the early 20th century.

The lecture began with Salk speaking about his father’s view on life and how when his father was a boy he did not want to go into science.

“He wanted to find a way to help people,” Dr. Salk explained to the audience in the Kaleidoscope building. According to Salk, science was the furthest thing from his father’s mind growing up. However, like most people, he decided to go where the money was, and thanks to the March of Dimes, the money for polio research was at an all time high.

According to his son, there are three stages of evolution that influenced Dr. Jonas Salk and his work.

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Salk explained that there is the pre-biologic stage which consists of life before single cell organisms, biologic life which consists of life with multi-cell organisms and finally there is meta-biologic stage which is life in the present and holds modern culture.

In 1948, Salk began work at the University of Pittsburgh with a team of scientists on a vaccine for Polio that was made without a live strand of the virus. Before then, it was a common belief that a vaccine could not be made without a live strand of the virus.

Dr. Peter Salk presented the film “The Shot Felt Around World.” The film showed the process of Dr. Jonas Salk finding the vaccine while telling how serious of a threat polio was in the early 20th century. The search for a vaccine or cure for polio began with the March of Dimes, which was a collection of dimes that many Americans participated in to help fight polio in the 1940s.

The challenges with finding the vaccine for polio is that they needed to be sure there are only three strains of it and find a vaccine that can protect the body from all three strains, Dr. Peter Salk said. He addressed a similar question later regarding cancer.

“The hard part about finding a vaccine or any kind of definite cure to cancer is that there are so many different kinds of cancer, so it would be difficult to find just one (vaccine),” Salk said.

Dr. Jonas Salk’s interest in humanity showed after he decided not to patent the polio vaccine.

“After the vaccine came out, the people from March of Dimes began the process of patenting the vaccine, and my father said that it was a vaccine for everyone and that there was no need to patent it,” Peter Salk said to the audience.

As of 1994 the World Health Organization said that polio has been completely eradicated from the Americas and that it only exists in the Middle East.

“There were three women who were paid to administer the vaccine in Pakistan but were killed by people who are against the western influence in the Middle East,” Peter Salk said.

Peter Salk, like his father, believes that in order for more cures to come about, people need to put aside their differences.

“We need to come together as a species in order to be able to find cures,” he said.